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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2025

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  • Probably clearer if i wrote: “the cost OR barriers to entry are very high”

    A cheap liquor still off the shelf is like $300, which is definitely not impulse buy territory IMO and before even getting to this point you’d have to have done at least a trivial amount of research to have learned how to distill and what machines to look at in the first place.

    Alternatively, they could build their own. But that would require doing an extensive amount of research on how to build a still, which in turn would end up providing you with a bunch of safety information regardless.

    This is definitely not common knowledge.


  • Because this is a thread about a reversal on a ban on distilling. My original comment mentioned all of those hobbies outside of any context of regulation/licensing due to the high risks inherent in their activities without any restrictions in place.

    Responder tried to argue that they all have restrictions. I said that it was false and then reiterated my main point, which is being glad (as a member of the homebrew community) that home distilling is now allowed, banning it was dumb, and everyone screaming in this thread about keeping it banned because of “dAnGeR” is unreasonable


  • All those components are set up so that they function a certain way, more dangerous versions are restricted

    TY for making my point for me, it was really nice of you. Legalization is what allows those manufactured safeguards to exist. Without legalization, there is no way a company is going to sell a still that meets a UL safety metric. Which in turn causes anyone who wants to do this to use a cobbled together rig that’s probably leaking fuel or gases.

    Lots of things that are dangerous are banned or restricted

    And lots of things that are dangerous are not banned or restricted, and are in fact extremely normalized. I could go buy fireworks in a tent on the side of the road, without needing to provide my age or any sort of training – and fireworks are VASTLY more dangerous than distilling.

    Dude distilling 5 gallons of wash with no understanding of how it works, the danger to him or his neighbours, no regulation of the parts or ingredients that go into his setup is a menace and an accident waiting to happen.

    Again, this is a product of prohibition and not having access to safe equipment or information. The cost/barriers to entry for home distilling are also very high. There is a minimum amount of research that you would need to do in order to understand what the procedure is and what equipment you would even need.

    Finally, I will once again state that the dangers of home distilling are extremely overblown. When New Zealand legalized home distilling there were zero reports of methanol poisoning from home-distillation, caused 0.14% of residential fires, and 0 deaths. 1 2 3.

    Someone is literally more likely to have a fire and/or die from an unattended candle.




  • Actually no: there are no courses, licensing, rules, or regulations for a hobbyist (which is who this ruling affects) on the majority of the things that I listed (cars, RC/drones, canning, making kombucha, and even to a certain extent guns. We trust adults to be adults and learn the skills required to do these things because the risk is almost entirely to them.

    If we had to ban everything that had a chance of causing harm to people, shouldn’t we ban gas stoves? Those could cause an explosion if someone was careless and left the gas running.

    A dude distilling 5 gallons of wash in his backyard for his own personal consumption is not the same as a distillery processing 1000 gallons of wash.


  • This is the biggest win for homebrewers since Jimmy Carter.

    Everyone in this thread talking about how people are gonna blow themselves up, but … okay? It’s up to the individual to make sure that they’re being safe and following adequate procedures. It’s not like working on cars, RC/drones (lithium batteries), flying planes, and guns are all perfectly safe hobbies, and those are all very normalized.

    In terms of safety surrounding unwanted product, like methanol, it’s again the person’s responsibility. Much like how it’s up to the canner to make sure they’re not giving people botulism or a kombucha to have only the wanted bacteria.






  • 100% agree, and made pretty much the same point in the LTT forum a while back. Flavor of the month people annoy tf out of me, I’ve been a linux user for over a decade and have never even thought of recommending something outside of the big 3 (debian/ubuntu (or mint if that’s your thing), fedora, arch)

    Tried and true distros are the only real option and IMO the difference between distros once everything is configured is mininal


  • I guess the other difference is that YouTube isn’t traditional media, the content you consume on there has no exclusivity or anything. And the creators producing it are incentivized to go where the biggest audience is (which will always be something free) to maintain relevance and gain bigger sponsorships

    Something like Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc. pays for the content in advance with MAYBE some royalties (and never a lot) and they own the media produced. YouTube doesn’t pay for production (they tried this and it failed horrifically) they pay a portion of the revenue that gets generated from viewership